November 2007

Dear Webmaster/Webmistress,

Very clever site. I’ve shared it with my friends and family and they all thought the ‘Arguments Against’ section was very cool. However, there is one thing I would like to call you on. In your hate-mail section, as a response to one letter, you claim that no one would actually choose to be homosexual because of all the crap s/he would get. My qualms with this aren’t really my own but those of people who ought to know better than I. Recently I’ve been attending a sexuality education class at my church (fellowship?). At the last meeting we had the oppurtinity of speaking with a panel of people from our community of whom two identified as homosexual, one as bi, one of whom was transgendered and the fifth of whom was intersex. Each of them had a problem with the argument that no one would choose to be gay. They believed that it was in some way a choice, which I understood (correctly or not) to mean the choose to openly express your feelings or to repress them. The bisexual woman explained that becoming a feminist was a choice that was bound to get her a lot of crap, but she still chose to become one. I got the impression also that they saw this claim as a justification for something that does not need to be justified. Hm. Well, I can see I’m not doing a very good job of explaining this. Well, anyway, I also wanted to convey the idea of sexual orientation as a spectrum. I don’t know if I’m telling you something you’ve already heard; I also know this has little relevance to anything I’ve said to this point and really has no context, but it’s something else about which the panel members spoke. They said that homosexuality and heterosexuality are two extreme ends of a spectrum with bisexuality landing directly in the center. Almost no one is 100% either way. Now I just probably sound like I’m trying to lecture you. I’m sorry. Anyway, my main point was to explain that some people who ought to know disagree with something you said. If you ever get a chanc e, talk to someone more on the ‘homo’ end of the spectrum than you though of course I say this having no idea where you fit in…). They might be able to explain all this better than I. Or, then again, they may completely disagree.

Anyway, I appologize for sending you such a long meandering letter.

There is definitely choice involved in how you present your sexuality, but I don’t think there’s that much choice involved when it comes down to how someone actually feels. I don’t know how much control an individual has over whom they are attracted to. I also agree that sexuality seems to be a spectrum — there has been some very interesting science along these lines recently.

Even given all this, I need to retract my statement about nobody choosing to be homosexual (in the sense of having the emotions of a gay person). I used to spend a lot of time in a woman’s bookstore in Westwood, and now that I think about it I do recall some lesbians saying that they hoped their daughter would be gay because they had had such horrible experiences with men. Obviously these people were happy not to be heterosexual despite the social problems being a lesbian brought with it.